OPENINGS:  PLAYING FOR KEEPS (FilmDistrict) cratered as expected, in 6th place on its opening day with a sad $2.1M start.  It’s on its way to a $6M weekend and perhaps $15M in total, which won’t even pay off its marketing costs. HOLDOVERS:  With essentially nothing new at the multiplexes, the longrunning hits mostly held […]

A newsmagazine took the crown on a mostly down night. NBC:  There must have been some reason why DATELINE zoomed 0.6 from last week, increasing its rating by more than 50% and topping the night with a 1.7.  Whatever it was, the show should consider trying it again.  The evening started with a decent 1.5 […]

  Mitch Metcalf’s Friday Box Office Report will return later today after some computer issues are resolved.  Meanwhile, it looks like this weekend’s box office predictions were very accurate:  the lone opener, PLAYING FOR KEEPS, is headed for $6.2M this weekend, just a shade below the $6.5M Showbuzzdaily Forecast.

  CBS, in keeping with its CBS-ness, announced a minimal set of tweaks to its schedule for midseason.  The network doesn’t have a lot of needs or vacancies, so it basically just filled those holes it has. To replace Partners on Mondays, the network is going to its pantry and retrieving the season’s supply of […]

Scandal shows some heat. ABC:  A dynamite episode of SCANDAL (written by creator Shonda Rhimes) that managed to propel the story both backwards and forwards via flashbacks and a startling episode-ending revelation had by far its best-rated episode of the season, up 0.3 from last week to 2.5 and notching a 10PM win.  This was […]

Thanks to Nielsen delays, Chicago Fire had to wait to get some unaccustomed good news. NBC:  CHICAGO FIRE benefits by not airing against a new CSI on CBS, because their audiences, while overlapping, prefer the latter when they can get it.  (Why, you might ask, schedule the NBC show against such clearly strength-sapping competition?  Well […]

Another lifeless weekend is in store this weekend, as the audience prepares for the holidays and puts of moviegoing until the week between Christmas and New Year’s, when there are seven weekend-volume days in a row.  Until then, we have a weekend which will add up to less than $80 million for the top dozen […]

  The National Board of Review is an organization whose members are largely unknown (and the opinions of whom are of zero interest), with an existence that gets noticed on exactly one day of the year, like that one groundhog whose shadow is checked each February.  (Put another way, it’s the Hollywood Foreign Press Association […]